5/31/2013

Three things occurred at Optify in the past two weeks that sum up well what we are constantly striving towards in the marketplace today. The more I thought about them, the more I just had to sit down with a cup of coffee and pound out a post.
Let’s start with the three items:

Launching a greatly enhanced Optify Contact Manager, integrating the view of all touchpoints of a given contact/lead in one place

An office visit in Seattle from a digital marketing agency owner from the Southeast

Anyone can do a customer newsletter

Here’s the first question I received internally when we were planning the webinar: “A retainer-based service for a customer newsletter, really? Anyone can do that.” Ahhh, exactly. The whole point is to create retainer-based services that the entry-level team members at an agency can execute, but are still extremely valuable to a client.
We keep our product simple for exactly that user – not the 15-year veteran, but marketers early in their careers with less experience but absolutely necessary in big numbers to staff the digital marketing ecosystem.
We also reviewed how critical it is for that newsletter to tie into contacts to see the actions taken after opening the email. We emphasized a call-to-action tying to a landing page, as well as being able to track all of those interactions in one place. Let’s also track the leads for additional products/services resulting from the newsletter call-to-action. This is cross-channel marketing at street level, yet no email vendor supports that integrated workflow. We, therefore, put a lot of focus on an integrated approach in our product.

What can possibly be new and different in a contact manager?

Glad you asked. Contact managers have been around since I installed ACT on my PC back in the mid-90s, and then of course the CRM vendors ladled on the layers of an account (with a tree structure to add complexity) and an opportunity. So why would we spend any time on this piece of our product?
To start with, we wanted to integrate all those cross-channel touchpoints for a lead or contact. We also wanted to integrate datasources. What does that mean? Our developers took on the complexity so that we could provide a much simpler user experience for anyone working in our Contact Manager.

Any landing page or form filled out is part of a contact’s timeline.

Any emails sent/opened/unsubscribed are there too, along with all pages visited on each website visit. You can of course drill in for detail or filter out.

LinkedIn and Dun & Bradstreet data sources are seamlessly integrated to provide as much information about that lead or contact as possible.

Want to track something else? Sure – just create some custom fields.

Instead of adding layers on top of contacts, like accounts and opportunities, like a typically complexified (love that word creation to describe most software today) CRM system, we kept a flat contact manager but allow quick segmentation by 20+ filter criteria. Then save that filtered list for actions – like sending that list an email, or exclude that list from receiving an email, or call that list, etc.
Our product team made the whole experience simpler with this release but even more tightly integrated with the rest of the cross-channel marketing effort.

Where does the rubber hit the road with our customers?

Where does all this come together? Interestingly, it comes together in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I’m from. Or this past week, I could see it mattered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How? Because we had an agency entrepreneur visit from the home of the LSU Tigers, and we sure hope his firm becomes a long-term partner.
His story is the story of market we are serving. He summarized the essence of his business very eloquently in just four sentences, so I’ll take the liberty of paraphrasing it here as best I can remember.
“I’m very proud of our agency. I started it just a year and a half ago in my living room. Today we have five employees and thirteen clients. The biggest challenge I have is delegating services off my plate as I add employees who are hungry but have less experience than I do.”
We’re working every day to arm that agency and every one of the 120,000 small agencies in North America alone to tell that story:

Grow the client base from single to double digits.

Grow from a handful of employees up to ten, and then to twenty-five.

Enable the owners to scale the business by delegating the execution of retainer-based services to other team members so they can focus on what they do best – bringing in new clients.

Our mission can’t be accomplished unless we keep it simple and integrated. No worries – we’ve got that covered in spades, and there’s plenty more to come.

No comments:

Google+ Followers

Rocket Builders

Follow by Email

About Me

Reg Nordman is the Managing Partner for Rocket Builders, a sales and marketing consultancy for high growth companies. He works with large and small companies such as , Asentus, Maximizer, Sophos, Microsoft Canada, and Research in Motion. Previously he has worked in direct and channel sales for major firms such as Unisys and Commodore.

Over the past 30 years this experience has spanned mining engineering at Anaconda Mines, teaching elementary and high school, working for the BC Provincial Government, lecturing on computing for the University of Victoria and University of British Columbia, sales for Unisys, Commodore, and Simply Computing/Strider Computer Centres, TNL Group, Westpro Construction, and Merit Consultants International. For his clients, Reg assists them in breaking through various sales and marketing challenges to grow the business. Using RocketBuilders Precision Sales and Marketing process he helps CEOS understand the dirty little secret about Sales and Marketing. What is that secret ? It has two parts. One, 95% of the money spent today by Sales and Marketing departments is “wasted” . Two, 100% close rations can be achieved.Â Reg is focused on getting clients “more effective selling time”.Reg has been publishing executive book reviews for his clients since 2002, and a blog since 2004. He has a BASc. (Mining) from the University of British Columbia, an M.Ed. (Curriculum Studies) from the University of Victoria and a Diploma in Management Skills in Applied Technology from Simon Fraser University. He is a member of the UBC Keevil School of Mines Industry Advisory Committee and has served on numerous community volunteer groups.